Testing a hypothesis with the methods of conceptual biology: A literature-based approach

Bachelorarbeit aus dem Jahr 2006 im Fachbereich Biologie - Mikrobiologie, Molekularbiologie, Note: 1,0, Westfalische Hochschule Gelsenkirchen, Bocholt, Recklingshausen, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Undoubtedly, the development of Conceptual Biology, which uses text-mining applications specific to biology is the only way to cope with the increasing amount of free textual data produced in this field. The increasing interest of users in efficiently retrieving and extracting relevant information, the need to keep up with new discoveries described in the literature or in biological databases, and the demands posed by the analysis of high throughput experiments, are the underlying forces motivating the development of Conceptual Biology tools, such as text-mining applications in molecular biology. Therefore the methods of Conceptual Biology have been used for this study to test the hypothesis, that genetically modified foods have no impact on public health. We studied the records of databases and those ones of Literature Based Discovery tools. After the binary scoring of the records with respect to their usefulness, they were also classified by their positive, neutral or negative conclusions with respect to the effect of genetically modified food on public health. In conclusion, we have to deny the hypothesis and therefore to state that genetically modified foods have an impact on public health. Further studies in conceptual biology may focus what kind of impact genetically modified food has on public health.